Today I learnt something new on how to learn. I got introduced to Bloom's Taxonomy and how to apply it to the teaching-learning process that wins my bread and that of my students, in their future. As teachers, we use a gamut of methods - from friendly discussion to rote learning to mental bullying - to convey our course content. As students, we receive and learn the course content in different routes including expedient mugging, hands on experience with guidance and recalcitrant self-study.

Bloom's taxonomy classifies such learning methods into neat boxes with fuzzy demarcations to promote realistic measurable.

The Wikipedia page details Bloom's Taxonomy but in brief, the story goes this way: In 1956 Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist chaired a committee that was asked to develop a system that would define whether students learned what they were taught. Bloom came up with a guideline on how to check on this, which is called the Bloom's Taxonomy.

In its original form (there is a revision today - see reference), as the accompanying figure shows, the taxonomy divided thinking (and learning) into six hierarchical sub-domains: Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analysing, Evaluating and Creating.

Bloom proposed them as a list in ascending order of cognition in the learning process.

Bloom's Taxonomy. Image Credit

The taxonomy essentially provides a way to organize thinking skills into six levels. One could look at the first three (bottom three, that is,) as lower-order thinking and the remaining three as higher-order thinking. Irrespective of a course (subject), such a classification can be perceived. Any course that seeks to impart learning, can do it in one or more levels of these cognition. At least, only in these section a student can be checked for, whether the supposed learning has happened.

Each of the section can be seen as a group of verbs or action items. For instance Remembering can be divided into various action verbs like acquire, define, identify, list, match, read, recognize, record, reproduce, write and so on. Understanding can include explain, express, while Create could be adapt, combine, compose, design, devise, modify, produce, speculate, transform and so on. While Remembering or Knowledge level check basic knowledge and memorization, Understanding or Comprehension checks literal understanding and if one can apply the concepts. Analysis checks for ones capacity to scrutinize while Evaluate or synthesis checks for ability to put concepts together to form a whole.

Say, we take Thermodynamics as the subject matter for learning. We could apply the taxonomy to plan what is to be the learning objective at the end of the course as follows:

(I list the taxonomy in the reverse for convenience)

• Remembering: Define or list the laws of thermodynamics, identify the terminology and equations for those laws and the variables involved, reproduce them (from memory) in short notice
• Understanding: Classify engineering devices based on the laws of thermodynamics (learnt in the lower order thinking, listed above), Explain the working of such devices based on thermodynamics, Discuss why and how these models and devices are classified thus, Provide examples on your own
• Applying: Compute properties of a thermodynamic system based on the content gained in Remembering and Understanding. Determine efficiency of systems based on the acquired knowledge so far. Solve numerical problems.
• Analysing: Correlate an existing method to determine efficiency of an engineering device to a new appliance. Distinguish a new (proposed) device from existing ones to justify use of methods used earlier. De-construct a derivation or formulation into its elemental steps from first principles, say, how a steady flow energy equation is derived and in what ways it is different from a Bernoulli equation.
• Evaluating: Critique a proposal for a power plant based on your knowledge of thermodynamics. Judge its feasibility. Justify why the proposed efficiency of a new device is (im)possible based on the thermodynamics learnt through the above four steps (from Remembering to Analysing).
• Creating: Construct a new device that doesn't violate the laws of thermodynamics but could improve existing efficiency values. Design a thermodynamically efficient heat exchanger. Combine the ideas of thermodynamics with another subject (say, fluid mechanics or biology) to seek fresh understanding of both. For example: Do living things violate second law of thermodynamics by living? Do fluids with negative viscosity - if they were - violate second law?

In the above application of Bloom's taxonomy, most are action items. They can be measured in an exam or assessment at the end of a course in any planned way. Obviously, Bloom's taxonomy can be reasonably adopted to any teaching session at least as a planning tool. it is recommended as one of the most widely applied models according to the references listed below.

Now for some polemics: Upon introduction to the taxonomy, what struck me first was how most of our institutions rigorously employ and check the bottom two (Remembering and Understanding) in our courses, but stop at that and deem the course as success. Yes, there are exceptions among us or in certain electives, but I am sure my claim isn't entirely baseless. Another observation follows perhaps automatically. In our advertisements, vision statement etc. we often cite as our objective, a variation of the top three higher-order thinking/learning (analyse, evaluate and create) in the taxonomy. As teachers in such institutions, often in a class, we are contended if we could do justice to the bottom three in the list.

One may jump up and argue - as I did with the instructor who introduced me to this taxonomy today - how one could implement the top three in an undergraduate program. The answer lies in our skill as teachers to introduce the student to the course using the essential lower-order thinking, while checking her even in the higher-order learning. In thermodynamics for instance, she can always be tested to evaluate or create using her high school knowledge of the subject, while more new knowledge (like Mollier diagram or thermodynamic cycles) can be imparted and tested using the remembering, understanding and applying mode. A good course promotes content in all the six categories of the taxonomy and evaluates the student for learning in at least in some of them.

Bloom's taxonomy is universal in its applicability. for instance in a generic math course the taxonomy could manifest as: Identifying x- and y- intercepts as Remembering, Develop linear business models as Creating. Similarly, in a generic Chemistry course, calculating mass of an element or ion in a compound i Applying, identifying evidence of a chemical reaction (litmus test etc.) is Analysing. Predicting what ions are formed from given elements using electron structure could be Creating - an activity my high-school chemistry teacher could do orally, which infuriated me so much, I became an engineering teacher.

References

1. Bloom's taxonomy - Wikipedia page
2. A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy: An Overview, David R. Krathwohl, Theory into Practice, Vol. 41, No. 4, Revising Bloom's Taxonomy (Autumn, 2002), pp. 212-218 Link to pdf
3. Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning Domains, The Three Types of Learning Website Link